


Long Live The New Flesh

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [85]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Tentacles, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 19:12:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7374001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarathotep, twp (Tentacles Without Plot)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Live The New Flesh

**Author's Note:**

> for resting-meme-face/FernDavant, who prompted: the unending howling void of Cthuloid horrors

 

They’re facing a wall at the end of a long alleyway when it happens the first time. The black swarm approaching, nowhere to run, no way out.

The Doctor grabs her hand, squeezing hard. “Clara, I-”

“Don’t. Do not start with that death’s-door confession shit because we are _not_ gonna die today.”

“You have a plan?”

“Nope.” She closes her eyes, a foreign sensation building inside her. “Just a feeling.”

And it’s a blur, after that. She opens her eyes and they’re on top of a building, and he’s yelling _run_ and they’re running, over the rooftop and down fire escapes, metal clattering under their feet. Down the street, through a restaurant back door, skidding through a kitchen full of surprised cooks, and a dining room full of oblivious patrons, out through the front door. Across the street to the museum, her lungs burning as they hurtle up the steps.

The manuscript collection, east wing. The Doctor flings his sonic paper at the baffled-looking woman peeking out of the tiny back office; Clara smiles apologetically.

No windows, here, but she knows somehow, can feel it. The swarm is approaching. Her skin is prickling, and something - else.

“Doctor,” she starts, fists clenched against the vague sense of dread, roughly swallowing down a wave of nausea.

“Not today, remember? So shut it.” He yanks a book off the shelf, something small and unremarkable (though she can feel it, can _taste_ it, metallic and bright-blue on her tongue) and slams it down on the table. The book’s spine is cracked down the middle, the pages fall flat, and his fingers are splayed over the pages, and when he looks up and their eyes meet, he’s as scared as she’s ever seen him.

The swarm surrounding the building, she can feel it.

“Here goes nothing,” he says, and she holds her breath.

 

 

The Doctor is still afraid when the universe shudders back into place. It’s a beautiful day, bright and cloudless and crisp. They walk down the museum steps together, and he is very pointedly not staring at her.

“Doctor,” she tries again, the name thick and heavy in her mouth.

“Not here, okay?” He takes her hand again, thumb rubbing the inside of her wrist. “Don’t worry, everything is alright, just keep walking.”

Everything is wrong, but she keeps walking anyway.

 

 

Back in the TARDIS, finally, door shut on the day and the outside world and she is - she is, what. Something, something else from what she’d been before. Scared and live-wire anxious, her heart in her throat and her skin too tight.

“It’s fine, you’re fine,” he says again. Scanning her body with the sonic screwdriver, the expression on his face somewhere close to panic.

“But,” she leads.

“But. You are, currently, generally speaking, uh. Somewhat less - less human, than you’d been.”

Of all the ways to put it. She pulls her mouth into the position of a smile, eyes watering and the floor dropping out, and she runs.

 

 

She takes stock, hunched down on the floor of whatever this room is. Maybe a special room made just for her, just for this particular crumbling of her sense of self, her shaky-pulse fear. A room without enough air, too open and not open enough. Her narrowly-focused dread as she lifts her arm up, flinching away from the new slit in her flesh by her ribcage, a puckered wound - not a wound - a place, an entrance, an abomination -

She swallows, clenches her teeth. Probing the edges of the hole in her, fingers pressing in, only just. Feeling something press _back._

There’s a knock on the door and it’s him, worried, and this is her, detaching and drifting, a step away from herself, as she clenches the muscles in her stomach and chest that she instinctively knows will push out a limb, not a limb, a thing, sticky and tense and -

“Just a bit of an infection,” he yells through the closed door. “Might not be permanent. And if it is, that’s fine, plenty of bipedal species have more than one set of arms.”

Not humans, though. No humans have this, the thick boneless muscle slithering out and out and out and - 

 

 

Clara can pick up things from far away, now. Can flick her other-arms out and curl the barbed tips around a mug of tea, a book, the Doctor. Holding him up with a strength that doesn’t even half make sense, her arms and her arms wrapped around him, and she can _feel_ him, the week-worn shirt and the metallic tang and the time, the time, days and years and centuries and on and on, caked on his skin. Metaphorically. Or whatever the name is for this unfounded, free-floating awareness.

He likes it, she knows. Likes her and likes this, his skin shifting beneath hers, falling back. His hitched breaths, ragged pulses, the look in his eyes. Fear, almost, but not. She flexes her arms and watches the blood drain from his face.

"If I can do this to you, just think about what I could do to anyone else.”

“With great power comes great responsibility,” he squeaks out, writhing helplessly.

“Spiderman? Really? Whatever.” Whatever. She clenches her muscles, his skin and his other skin - other…? - gathering beneath her touch.

Clara is terribly, crushingly, overwhelmingly afraid, but Clara isn’t exactly here right now. Not entirely.

“Clara-” And the rest of it, whatever he’d been about to say, choked on and swallowed. The dirt on him, his mouth open as he goes down, down. 

 

 

“You are beautiful,” he whispers. “Always, always. Clara Oswald. You are fantastic, whatever else changes, know that to be true.”

Bruised and stiff and she’s massaging his shoulders, lotion slick on her hands. The marks she’d left. Welts, burns, his pale skin raised and red.

He rights himself, posture straightened. Not too much. “Can I. Can I see?”

She drops her hands down to his waist, sliding around to nestle above his cock. Has he always been so delicate? Flushed and soft and small, and trembling. She doesn’t feel as short as her 5'2 height dictates, not anymore. Her chin tucked over his neck and her arms, her arms around him. Feeling the strength that is in her, now. The threatening benevolence of not using it.

He reaches back gently and hovers until he finds what he’s looking for. Thumb rubbing over the underside of her, her whatever it is, she refuses all the available words - the new part of her flexing and searching, the rough-hooked sandpaper coldness, the oozing wet. His grip firm as she tries to pull back, suddenly remembering - coming to - the shuddering rug-yanked-out drop of what she is, what she’s become - is she crying? is he? She’s falling apart, and he is too. The swarm in her, around them both.

“And if we can’t fix this - ”

 _If we even want to fix this,_ she thinks, as she says “Of course we will.”

“If we can’t. Then. It’ll be okay. You and me, we’ll be okay.”

Her arms, her arms digging into him, hard over his hipbones, the newfound sensory fact of his pubic hair, foreskin, balls. Delicate, so impossibly delicate. The cold-wet slide of her over him, holding fast. He’s mewling, knees buckling, hanging desperately onto her as she surrounds him. As she lets herself go. No running, not now. With great something comes great something-something. She relaxes, and spills out, and catches him as he slips, arms wrapped protectively around him.


End file.
